BOEM to offer 45m acres of offshore Gulf of Mexico sites for development

US federal government agency the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced on Thursday that next month it will offer around 45m acres of offshore Gulf of Mexico potential oil and gas fields in two lease sales.

The sales will be held back-to-back in New Orleans on March 23. One sale, by far the bigger, will offer about 44.3m acres offshore Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabam. The other sale will offer almost 600,000 acres offshore Alabama and Florida.

These lease sales will, be the ninth and 10th such ones under the Obama administration’s Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program (2012-2017).

The BOEM is part of the Department of the Interior and it is responsible for ensuring that the development of these offshore resources is done in an orderly and timely manner while observing environmental safeguards.

With 28 years experience writing and editing for newspapers in the UK and Hong Kong, Donal is now based in California from where he covers the Americas for Splash as well as ensuring the site is loaded through the Western Hemisphere timezone.